Be Part of Where You Live

What concerns me is how our information networks have enabled us to become hyper-connected to geographically distant communities, while at the same time disconnected from our local ones. Virtual and long-distance relationships can enrich our lives in myriad ways, but I fear that our reliance on them has the potential to erode our physical communities and diminish our sense of place. Wendell Berry once said that “If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are.” Knowing wh...

 Beginnings of the Reputation Economy

The formal reputation networks that exist AF arose organically from the informal social media developed through the 21st century. An early barrier to interacting with strangers online—particularly when engaging in financial transactions—was not knowing if the person you were dealing with was reliable. Primitive reputation scores were the first solution, enabling buyers to rate sellers. These systems rapidly spread to social networks, discussion forums, and filesharing sites, as a way of v...